1. May Day

May 1 is May Day, an ancient festival that celebrates the abundance of flowers and warm weather at this time of the year. To celebrate the day, cut out pictures from today's newspaper that remind you of May and springtime. As a class, make an art collage, using everyone's pictures. Display your work in the classroom. Come up with a creative title for your collage.

Learning Standard: Reading and writing with developing fluency, speaking confidently, listening and interacting appropriately, viewing strategically and representing creatively.

2. Old Mother Goose

May 1 is also observed by many people as Mother Goose Day. Use today's newspaper to look for a humorous story that interests you. Then think of a nursery rhyme or children's song you like. Retell the story from the newspaper in the style of the nursery rhyme or song you chose. Share with the class.

Learning Standard: Writing fluently for multiple purposes to produce compositions, such as personal narratives, persuasive essays, lab reports or poetry.

3. Super Volcano

Volcanoes are some of the most spectacular things in nature. And one that blew up in the nation of Iceland in the northern Atlantic Ocean filled the air with such thick smoke and ash that it forced airlines to stop making flights to the continent of Europe. Hundreds of flights from the United States were among those halted, because the ash could damage jet engines and cause planes to crash. It took nearly a week for flights to start up again from the April 14 eruption. As a class, research and talk about how volcanoes are formed. Then find other stories about weather or natural events that affect people. Write a paragraph describing one such event.

Learning Standards: Describing and understanding natural changes in the Earth's surface, including those caused by volcanoes, earthquakes, erosion and rivers; investigating and describing what makes up weather and how it changes; analyzing the relationships between human activities and the atmosphere.

4. Benjamin Hooks

The civil rights movement for racial equality attracted people of many different talents. But few had as many different talents as Benjamin Hooks, who died this month at the age of 85. Hooks was president of the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights group. He was a lawyer and the first African American judge appointed for criminal courts in the state of Tennessee. He was a businessman who ran fried chicken restaurants. And he was a minister who served churches in both Michigan and Tennessee. After he died April 15, Hooks was honored at his Michigan and Tennessee churches, and people from all over the nation came to pay their respects. As a class, talk about how important it is that people be treated equally. In teams, find a story in the newspaper that involves how people are treated. Write a sentence explaining what kind of treatment is making news.

Learning Standards: Acquiring information from multiple sources; identifying the responses of individuals to historic violations of human dignity involving discrimination, persecution and crimes against humanity; writing fluently for multiple purposes.

5. Scavenger

Scientists have known for a long time that the dinosaurs known as velociraptors were meat-eaters. But a new fossil find shows that velociraptors (vel-OSS-eer-RAP-tors) also were scavengers that ate creatures that already had died or been killed. The fossil from Inner Mongolia in the Asian country of China reveals teeth from a velociraptor among the bones of a sheep-sized plant-eater called Protoceratops (PRO-toe-SER-a-tops). Scientists said the position of the teeth indicate that the velociraptor was cleaning the last meat off the bones of a dead dinosaur, rather than eating one it had killed. As a class, talk about the Web of Life in nature, in which meat-eaters eat plant-eaters or other meat-eaters to stay alive. Then find examples of plant-eaters and meat-eaters in the newspaper today or over several days. Which do you find more of? On a piece of paper, draw a Web of Life showing how these animals would connect to each other if they all lived in the same place.

Learning Standard: Comparing and classifying familiar organisms on the basis of observable physical characteristics; representing creatively.